Angela Merkel passionately defends the 16 years she spent at the head of Europe’s largest economy in her memoirs titled “Freedom” (“Freiheit”), published this Tuesday, November 26 in around thirty countries.
The former chancellor, 70, is accused today of having left Germany dangerously dependent on cheap Russian gas and of having contributed to the rise of the extreme right with her policy of openness towards immigrants.
Absent from the political debate since she left power at the end of 2021, Angela Merkel speaks again today at a time when the news is marked by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the return of Donald Trump to the White House and the electoral campaign in Germany with a view to the early legislative elections next February.
About refugees
You have never been attacked as much as for your management of the migration crisis, where you ordered not to return refugees arriving at the country’s borders in September 2015. Explain your motivations at that time, your “vision of Europe and globalization” prompted him to write these memoirs, he says in the work published in France by Albin Michel.
By uttering a historic phrase: “Let’s get there” (“Wir schaffen das” in German), he exhibited “an attitude.” “Where there are obstacles, we must work to overcome them.”
He says he “still doesn’t understand,” referring to a selfie with a Syrian refugee, “that one could assume that a friendly face in a photo would be enough to incite entire legions to flee their homeland.”
Although he states that “Europe must always protect its external borders”, he emphasizes that “prosperity and the rule of law will always make Germany and Europe (…) places where we want to surrender.”
On the rise of the German far-right AfD (“Alternative for Germany”, translated into French as “Alternative for Germany”), he warns democratic parties: if they “believe that they can contain the advance of the AfD by continuing relentlessly to seize its issues , or even engaging in rhetorical one-upmanship without proposing concrete solutions to existing problems, will fail.”
On the energy side
Since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it has been criticized for making Germany dependent on Russian gas supplies. However, he points out, the creation of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline was signed by his predecessor, the Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder, who later became chairman of the shareholders’ committee and the supervisory board of this company.
For Nord Stream 2, the second gas pipeline to enter service, which he gave the green light long after the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, he explains that at that time it would have been “difficult for so many to accept Germany.” ..) than in many EU Member States” the import of other more expensive fuels.
This choice is also justified by the gradual abandonment of nuclear energy, which had been decided in 2011 after the Fukushima catastrophe: “natural gas fulfills the function of a transitional fossil technology more than ever”, waiting for the energy renewables take over. .
He also recommends not going backwards on atomic energy in Germany, as some defend: “We do not need it to meet our climate goals, to be technologically efficient and, in doing so, to instill courage in ‘other countries’.
His confrontation with Vladimir Putin
No other leader is as criticized in this memoir as Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he describes as “a perpetually alert man, afraid of being mistreated and always ready to throw punches, including playing power with a dog and making others wait.
However, he “continues to think” that “despite all the difficulties (…) he did well to insist (…) on not letting contacts with Russia be broken (…) and on also preserving ties through commercial channels. relationships, beyond mutual economic benefits.” Because, he emphasizes, “Russia is, along with the United States, one of the two main nuclear powers in the world” and is a neighbor of Europe.
She also continues to defend her opposition to Ukraine joining NATO at the Bucharest summit in 2008, considering it illusory to think that candidate status would have protected her from Vladimir Putin’s aggression.
Source: BFM TV
